National Organization Of (Some) Women Gets It Wrong, More On Muzzammil Hassan And Domestic Violence

by KufiGirl :: posted 19 February 09

photo courtesy of yasmine

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from KufiGirl

When HijabMan posted his entry on the murder of Aasiya Hassan yesterday, “On Giving Men a Free Pass,” I was thankful. It was, I thought, another sign that the Muslim community is taking the issue of domestic violence seriously. In some cases the talk is coming from corners where the discussion is long overdue – there’s no use pretending otherwise – but if there is any small good that can come out of this woman’s brutal murder I hope that it will be in the form of more attention to violence against women, and the need for Muslim leaders, in particular, to address it.

Secular North American feminists have been at the forefront of this issue since the 1970s. In theory, they should be playing a leadership role as well. Instead, though, we get quotes like this from NOW-New York, attacking the use of the term “domestic violence” in Aasiya Hassan’s case:

The ridiculous juxtaposition of “domestic” and “beheading” in the same journalistic breath points up the inherent weakness of the whole “domestic violence” lexicon… This was, apparently, a terroristic version of “honor killing,” a murder rooted in cultural notions about women’s subordination to men. Are we now so respectful of the Muslim’s religion that we soft-peddle atrocities committed in it’s name?

I’m not sure what a “terroristic version” of an honor killing is, or how it’s worse than the regular kind. But I do know that “cultural notions about women’s subordination to men” are not limited to Muslim countries. And the thing is? Marcia Pappas, NOW-New York’s president, should know that, too. I expect sensationalistic coverage from FOX News (who tell us divorce “is not permitted in their culture,” and that such crimes will increase if left “unchecked by Western law”). But mainstream feminist groups like NOW keep doggedly insisting, year after year, that no, really, we speak for all women, not just white middle-class women. Really! We swear! And yet when something like this happens, they inevitably revert to the same tired script: When white men kill white women, they do it out of misogyny. But when brown men kill brown women, they do it because they’re, well, brown.

Last year I attended a conference at UMass-Boston called “Engaging Islam,” where Lila Abu-Lughod, a Palestinian-American feminist anthropologist who has done work in Egypt, gave a talk about honor killings. As she was researching this issue, she found that many cases of family-based violence in the Muslim world were labeled “honor crimes” but did not have the characteristics that would merit this label (i.e., a girl killed by male family members over real or imagined sexual indiscretions); for example, one case was that of a Palestinian father who likely killed his daughter because she was about to expose him as an informant. While family-based violence should be a serious issue in any circumstance, there was nothing uniquely Muslim about this case. This lack of distinction between forms of violence, she found, was typical of research on the subject; reported numbers of honor killings varied dramatically, from fourteen a year to four thousand a year, depending on how “honor killing” was defined.

She also asked how descriptions of these situations capture the flow of life-as-lived in areas where these acts are practiced. In her own fieldwork with the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin in Egypt, she said, the emphasis on honor and morality was true, but girls’ lives could not be reduced to those factors – as in any community they were valued for their individual personalities, scolded for their mistakes, and so forth. And, as in all societies, there were violent husbands, brothers who committed incest, and other transgressions, but the perpetrators were considered as individuals, not men who were acting out their “culture.” Finally, she said there is no evidence of honor crimes being on the increase (because the state of research on the subject is so inconsistent), but if this is true, it’s more likely to be found in areas of rapidly changing social circumstances, rather than being an example of societies following an “ancient code of morality.”

Was Aasiya Hassan’s murder an honor killing? There’s no evidence of that. We’ve only heard that she wanted a divorce. While that clearly infuriated her husband, there’s nothing “Muslim” about such fury. It has been well-documented that one of the most dangerous times, for a woman who has been the victim of domestic violence, is when she finally decides to leave. The question, for feminists, is how to condemn honor crimes without playing into a wider discourse that depicts Muslim women as abject and “Other.”

This is not the first time that a large, mainstream feminist organization that claims to speak for all women has made it clear that it only speaks for some. We should expect better.

KufiGirl, a regular guest @ hijabman, now blogs at laura.fo as well. Go visit her!

Do Muslims Never Get to Have an Idea of Their Own? Reinterpretating Islam In Turkey

by KufiGirl :: posted 2 March 08

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by KufiGirl

The case of Turkey’s Department of Religious Affairs “reinterpreting” the hadith to make Islam more palatable to modern sensibilities has been the big story in Islamic circles this week. It was reported in the British press and received with fanfare across the blogosphere. I admit I am perplexed.

With the huge, blinding, blinking-lights-in-neon caveat that I Am Not An Islamic Scholar, and that I welcome comments from those who are, I need to rant about this because the whole idea of “reinterpreting” the hadith from a modern standpoint just doesn’t make a lot of sense if you know how the hadith works. This is NOT because everything in Islam is set in stone and there can be only one interpretation and Muslims are conservative fanatics who believe a seventh-century code is the only proper guide to life in the modern era and therefore cannot bear the idea of new readings on old problems — it’s because the hadith is already considered potentially unstable. But there is an established way of dealing with this. All Muslims know that, hence the collective “huh?” at this becoming such a big story in the West over the last few days.

To make the first of what I’m sure will be a series of scandalous simplifications, a hadith can be compared to an ancient game of telephone. Unlike the Qur’an, which was considered divine and memorized word-for-word, hadiths were stories told about (not by) Muhammad and were intended to complement (not replace) the Qur’an. Some of these were told by multiple people, though wording and details vary from person to person. Taken collectively, the hadith describes the traditions and sayings of Muhammad (the sunnah), which is the second-highest source of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, after the Qur’an.

Of course, like any game of telephone, there is danger in a story becoming corrupted as it goes through a chain of narrators. Allowing for this, each hadith is verified individually according to several factors, such as the character of the original narrator and the reliability of his or her memory, whether or not the chain of narration is unbroken, the number of narrators telling the same story, and so on. What you get, in the end, is a collection of thousands of hadiths with varying degrees of reliability. It is perfectly possible to have a hadith told by one unstable guy whom no one liked who had an ulterior motive and no one to back up his story, a story which doesn’t even make sense anyway because no one believes Muhammad would really have done that thing this guy claims he did. Right? So that hadith would still be part of the conversation around Islamic law, but it would be classified as a fabrication or otherwise unsupportable by a variety of methods used to validate individual hadiths. In casual conversation these are usually referred to as “weak” hadiths (although the word for weak, da’if, has a specific meaning in this context).

By the same token, you can have a very “strong” hadith, let’s say one told by twenty different companions of the prophet who were all noble servants of God and had no motive to lie, telling a story that seems consistent with the Qur’an, followed up by an unbroken chain of narration — and still argue about the applicability of that hadith to modern circumstances. For cases like this there are a number of “lower” sources of Islamic interpretation,* such as reasoning by analogy, decision by consensus, and, at the lowest level, the acceptance of default cultural practice when it does not conflict with any of the above.

This process happens all the time. It is an assumed part of ‘official’ Islamic jurisprudence, as well as a common conversation that goes on informally among Muslims on a dead regular basis. This is a good example, or this debate about the hijab, or this post regarding Islam’s association with misogyny.

So when the BBC article says that the Turkish Department of Religious Affairs claims “that a significant number of the [hadiths] were never uttered by Muhammad”, that’s a serious case of non-news. Yet the tone of the article, and the tone of discussion around it, implies that this is a shocking new development in Islam, one that only a secular state like Turkey would have the courage to initiate and the kind of thing we could only see in our present world climate, now that Islam has been called on the carpet and ordered to modernize.

Okay, you say, so acknowledging the (sometimes) problematic sourcing of (some) hadiths is old hat, but what about the “strong” hadiths perceived to be incompatible with modernity? Isn’t Turkey so very brazen and forward-thinking to go there, too? From the article:

Prof Mehmet Gormez, a senior official in the Department of Religious Affairs and an expert on the Hadith, gives a telling example.

“There are some messages that ban women from travelling for three days or more without their husband’s permission and they are genuine.

“But this isn’t a religious ban. It came about because in the Prophet’s time it simply wasn’t safe for a woman to travel alone like that. But as time has passed, people have made permanent what was only supposed to be a temporary ban for safety reasons.”

The project justifies such bold interference in the 1,400-year-old content of the Hadith by rigorous academic research.

Prof Gormez points out that in another speech, the Prophet said “he longed for the day when a woman might travel long distances alone”.

So, he argues, it is clear what the Prophet’s goal was.

Fine… but still not new. Feminists in Tunisia, for example, successfully achieved a ban on polygamy by arguing that it was permissible in the seventh century as a means of protection for widows and orphans during wartime, but that monogamy was clearly the Qur’anic ideal. This law, passed several decades ago, would have been even more controversial than what Turkey is doing now because these women were arguing about the Qur’an, not the hadith, and the Qur’an is considered the literal word of God.

Likewise, we hear of women trained in this “new” thinking going to rural parts of Turkey to explain that honor killings are not Islamic:

One of the women, Hulya Koc, looked out over a sea of headscarves at a town meeting in central Turkey and told the women of the equality, justice and human rights guaranteed by an accurate interpretation of the Koran – one guided and confirmed by the revised Hadith.

She says that, at the moment, Islam is being widely used to justify the violent suppression of women.

“There are honour killings,” she explains.

“We hear that some women are being killed when they marry the wrong person or run away with someone they love.

“There’s also violence against women within families, including sexual harassment by uncles and others. This does not exist in Islam… we have to explain that to them.”

Yet another noble effort. Yet again, nothing new. There are so many examples of this I’m not going to list them here; suffice it to say that sending educated women into rural provinces to explain “true” Islam to illiterate peasant women is a well-established tradition in the Middle East and Central Asia, one that goes back at least 100 years, to the beginning of the feminist movement, and arguably much longer if we widen the discussion to include the historic role of Islamic schools in the teaching of literacy. My daughter’s great-aunt, for example, born in 1920, got her first job as a teacher driving throughout Saudi Arabia, teaching girls in village schools. This was during a time of great upheaval, when the role of educating women was hotly contested. When this right was defended it was done so via the argument that women should learn “proper Islam” in place of “ignorant cultural practices.” As evidenced by the Turkish case, elements of that debate continue today, on remarkably similar terms. Whether or not you find that position sufficiently radical to result in real change for women, at least situate it historically and acknowledge that this is not an example of bold new thinking.

Okay, you say, so it’s not “new.” Whatever. It’s still good, right? This idea that Islam is subject to interpretation? Isn’t it exciting to see people take up a project like this, in the face of certain fossilized versions of religion?

My problem here is that the perception of “newness” IS the story. It conforms to the view that Muslims occupy an earlier point on the progress timeline, and must be ripped, by force if necessary, into the modern era. (The Guardian article on this subject is called “Turkey strives for 21st century form of Islam” — in case we forgot that most OTHER Muslims are of the Dark Ages variety.) Sure, we may hate military intervention, but how else to foster change in a region where (we erroneously believe) people are still adhering to a form of religion unchanged and unquestioned for 1,400 years? That Muslims might — finally! for once! — be taking on this task through their own initiative is exciting only in the sense that we privately congratulate ourselves for having pushed them into it. When they stand up, we’ll stand down. And so on.

The Guardian article makes this connection explicit:

The exercise in reforming Islamic jurisprudence, sponsored by the modernising and mildly Islamic government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, is being seen as an iconoclastic campaign to establish a 21st century form of Islam, fusing Muslim beliefs and tradition with European and western philosophical methods and principles.

The result, say experts following the ambitious experiment, could be to diminish Muslim discrimination against women, banish some of the brutal penalties associated with Islamic law, such as stoning and amputation, and redefine Islam as a modern, dynamic force in the large country that pivots between east and west, leaning into the Middle East while aspiring to join the European Union.

“Muslim beliefs and tradition” are balanced against “European and western philosophical methods and principles.” They get to claim “stoning and amputation”; we get to claim “modern” and “dynamic.” To drive this point even further into the ground, both articles rely on the tired trope of this leading to the possibility of “an Islamic reformation”: an ahistorical idea rooted in the notion that Islam has remained stagnant.

In a related vein, the excitement here betrays a belief that extreme forms of Islamic conservatism begin with overly literal readings of Islamic texts. I’ve found this belief to be very popular with people who know a lot about, and are disgusted by, Christian fundamentalism. Islamic fundamentalism, they extrapolate, must be similar, only like using the Muslim Bible or whatever instead. I bet they hate science and abortion, too! In addition to ignoring some major theological reasons for this analogy not holding up, it’s a framework that ignores the role of political circumstances, particularly colonialism, in shaping Islam-as-political-project. That’s a separate and much longer discussion, but I’m noting it because I think, despite the fact that the word “terrorism” is never used, the read-between-the-lines hope being expressed here is that if Muslims only KNEW they had good, solid Islamic alternatives to Waging War On The Infidels, they would pack up and go home.

This is part of why the word “revised” is so problematic in this context. Read this sentence again:

One of the women, Hulya Koc, looked out over a sea of headscarves at a town meeting in central Turkey and told the women of the equality, justice and human rights guaranteed by an accurate interpretation of the Koran – one guided and confirmed by the revised Hadith.

There is no need to develop “revised Hadith” to make this point, since honor killings have never been an accepted part of Islamic practice. To note this is not to criticize the Turkish project itself, but to critique, again, its portrayal as daring innovation, because if anything such a portrayal lends credibility to the idea that actually honor killings ARE part of “real,” “authentic” Islam. Not only is this false, but it is exactly the opposite of the project’s intent. The implication is that, until last Tuesday, Muslims spent over a thousand years laboring under a medieval religious tradition; the only question now is whether or not they will accept “revisions” undertaken by a secular country like Turkey.

Which is an interesting subject itself. Had it not been for this rush of Western interest, I’d be optimistic. Turkey is secular, but its recent election was won by a (slightly) more conservative pro-Islamic party, and whatever the country’s modern politics, it still retains an association with the Ottoman Empire, which would have been the proper site for a major Islamic project such as this one. More problematic is that it is being undertaken by a government agency, and government-sponsored mouthpieces of religion (an unfamiliar concept in the U.S., but popular abroad, not only in Muslim countries) are prone to issuing verdicts that are inevitably taken with a grain of salt. Still, the aim of this project sounds like something akin to Google — not the creation of new content, but the organization of old. Although this is being described as an attempt to overwrite all previous forms of Islam, I think, among Muslims, it would have been taken for what it was: an unusually ambitious but ultimately common and therefore familiar attempt to apply Islamic jurisprudence to modern circumstances. I have no particular problem with that, so long as it is understood to be part of a much larger discourse (and not, say, a state-sanctioned Wahhabist-style attempt to render all other readings moot).

Now, however, Turkey has been put on the defensive. This week, Mehmet Görmez, the director of the project, issued a statement decrying the BBC article, saying the Directorate of Religious Affairs is going so far as “to take the appropriate legal measures for redress” because the project was so inaccurately portrayed:

“Our project is not aimed at effecting a radical renewal of the religion, as is claimed by the BBC. Our objective is to help our citizens attain a better understanding of the hadith. Though I underlined several times during our interview with a BBC reporter that our project cannot be considered a reformation of Islam, he distorted the facts, saying Turkey is preparing to publish a document that represents a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam — and a controversial and radical modernization of the religion.” ...

A fresh look at the hadith collections — the gathering of which began some 200 years after the death of the Prophet Mohammed — and how they are utilized and interpreted within the framework of Islamic jurisprudence, while sure to generate a degree of criticism and controversy, is a far cry from attempting to change, in effect, some of Islam’s most important historical records…

“I had an interview with BBC reporter Robert Pigott around two months ago about the project. I underscored during our interview that it cannot be termed a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam. But, his article read ‘the very theology of Islam is being reinterpreted in order to effect a radical renewal of the religion.’ This does not reflect the truth.”

If this denunciation speaks louder than the original misreporting, the project may still find an audience. If not, I’m guessing it’ll be tossed in the pot along with other ideas assumed to be Western-tainted pseudo-Islam, inciting not “revolution” or “reformation,” but reactionary backlash and a further retreat into religious conservatism.

* This process is Sunni — Shi’a practices vary.

KG: This is not a constructive use of time.

by KufiGirl :: posted 25 September 07

I will not spend Ramadan arguing on the internet about honor killings.
I will not spend Ramadan arguing on the internet about honor killings.
I will not spend Ramadan arguing on the internet about honor killings.

- deep breath –

Just once, though, I would like to see a debate that goes something like this:

Person 1:
“The only country to use nuclear weapons is the United States.
Most Americans are Christian.
Therefore, using nuclear weapons is a Christian practice.
Therefore, if we want to calm the nuclear arms race, we must engage with these Christians by asking them to re-interpret the parts of the Bible that say ‘thou shalt bomb Japan.’ What is that, Leviticus? Whatever. Look it up. Anyway, I’m sure there are ways to do this that are sensitive to the other, less crazy parts of their religion.”

Person 2:
“But the fact that most Americans are Christians has nothing to do with Hiroshima and Nagasaki! There were political factors at play! Besides, Israel and Pakistan both have nukes, and they’re not Christian countries. And there are many Christian countries that don’t have them. It’s much more complex than that.”

Person 3:

“Are you saying the killing of thousands of people is ‘complex’? What’s complex about it? It’s mass murder! Wow, you’ve really gone off the deep end of moral relativism! Why are you always apologizing for these people?”

Person 2:

“No, I didn’t mean murder is complex, I meant the reasons for… ugh, never mind.”

- headdesk –

—kufigirl

KG: Iran?

by KufiGirl :: posted 6 September 07

I know many people reading this are living outside the U.S., and I’m curious: How is the escalation of the American-Iranian conflict being covered in your country? What’s the Man/Woman-On-The-Street view of it?

Around here, I think the typical reaction would be “What escalation of the American-Iranian conflict?” But here are some links worth pondering:

From Taromeet:

“Average people I talk to here do not believe the Bush administration would attack and/or invade Iran for a variety of reasons: the U.S. military is already spread too thin; the growing public unease about the war in Iraq; lack of public support for a third war; it’s just too crazy an idea, even for these loons… I usually nod and acknowledge the logic of those arguments, which would certainly give better leaders pause. However, I do not believe this administration acts on logic. I think they have proven that time and again. While the idea of an attack on Iran has been bought up before, the tone seems to be changing from the theoretical to the inevitable. Recent weeks have brought some disturbing writings concerning a U.S. strike on Iran. These are not the rantings of wild-eyed, tin foil hat-wearing conspiracy theorists…”

Read more for the links she provides, from Juan Cole, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Salon.com, and other sources that, as she says, are not exactly those of raving lunatics.

And Howard A. Rodman from The Huffington Post:

“[T]he foreign press, which during the run-up to Iraq was far less blinkered than, say, the Gray Lady, has been over this weekend treating an attack on Iran as a fait accompli. See this from the Telegraph (UK). The Times (UK) ran today a headline with the flat declaration, Pentagon ‘three-day blitz’ plan for Iran. The blitz includes what The Times terms ‘plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran.’”

Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert at NYU, writes on the Global Affairs blog of an American media campaign, planned to begin this week, which will ramp up the rhetoric against Iran: “They don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this—they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is ‘plenty.’”

If that quote’s accurate, if that’s their standard, they shouldn’t have any trouble. The Telegraph article (linked above) reports that “[t]he latest polls show that just one in five Americans would support the bombing of Iran now, but about half would do so if their government considered it necessary: clearly a position from which Mr Bush could build a case for war. Three out of four voters want to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.” *

Of course all this is unsourced speculation. Besides, even if it’s true, the prospect of a public relations campaign in favor of war does not equal STOCK UP ON DUCT TAPE AND BOTTLED WATER NOW. Though the level of detail some of these war plans go into is enough to give a person pause, it’s also true that — as one Pentagon source said — “We have a targeting list and there are plans, but then there are also plans for repelling an invasion from Canada.” So.

But I also find it a bit naive to think that the only thing keeping us out of Iran right now is public disapproval.

For one thing, as the stats above show, the public isn’t all that disapproving. For another, where is the evidence that Bu$h & Co. are above all else guided by their approval ratings?

Third, the plan as outlined is a three-day bombing attack, not a dreary commitment of Iraqi proportions. (Criticize that plan for what it is, but you must admit it’s easier to sell when they frame it that way.)

Fourth, there’s ample evidence that this PR campaign is already underway, cf. the designation of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization — the first time such a label has been applied to a government’s military, as opposed to an independent, non-state organization — or Bush’s speech last week to the American Legion in Reno, in which he invoked the specter of nuclear holocaust and said, among other things, that he has “authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”

Fifth, none of the current presidential front-runners have their political roots in the neocon movement. For you and me this signals a dim hope that the post-election world might be a slightly less Orwellian place, but for Bush et. al. it’s call to panic. Once he’s out of office, he and Cheney will retain political influence but they’ll no longer have their fingers poised directly over The Button. I’ve heard people argue that any engagement with Iran is unlikely since it’s so late in Bush’s second term. It seems to me that’s one of the better reasons to worry: they’ve wanted this for years, but their clock is running out.

Whatever they’re up to, I wonder what they think they can accomplish in the next 16 months. If bombing’s not on the table, what is?

I’m curious to know what folks outside the United States think.

(For an excellent article outlining the background of Iran and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, read The US and the Iranian Nuclear Impasse.)

—kufigirl

KG: An interview with Hanne Blank, part I

by KufiGirl :: posted 25 June 07

Virgin book jacket “Like gold or cattle, land or cloth, female virginity has long been treated as a type of property,” writes Hanne Blank, an independent historian, feminist author, and former sex educator. “But this practice, however long and well-established, is in many ways a paradox. Unlike other forms of property, virginity is essentially intangible… Using it as an object of trade seems almost like trading in wind, fog, or oceanfront properties in Luxembourg. But for thousands of years, virginity has been considered a form of real as well as symbolic property, and treated that way without a shred of irony.”

Blank’s latest book, Virgin: An Untouched History, recounts virginity’s cultural history. From the ancient Greeks to the Middle Ages, through Victorian England and Puritan America to Beverly Hills, 90210 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Blank looks at the myriad ways female virginity has been defined, policed, purchased, sold, lost, and defended.

I recently met Ms. Blank at a reading in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and last week sent her an e-mail plea to let me interview her for this blog. She wrote back the same evening and said, “Oh! I’d love to. I am an occasional reader of HijabMan myself, actually.”

* * *

KufiGirl: You describe virginity as “relative but relevant.” Can you explain what you mean by that?

Hanne Blank: The short answer is that virginity has not always been handled, treated, or defined in the same way across time periods or across cultures, but in whatever form(s) it takes or has taken, it has always been socially, culturally, and religiously important regardless. Virginity both is and is not a monolith, in other words. It often appears monolithic because it has such a consistent, and consistently important, presence in so many cultures. But in reality, it’s much more of a mosaic.

KG: You devote chapter 3 to “hymenology,” pointing out that, contrary to popular belief, the hymen is not “like the head of a drum, a skin that is stretched across the opening of the vagina,” but rather a bit of flesh that comes in “a wide and colorful variety of configuration and shape,” and that a hymen without an opening is considered a birth defect that must be corrected surgically. Yet a belief persists that doctors can always tell if a girl has had vaginal sex, just by looking at her hymen. What’s up with that?

HB: Medical history teaches us, by example, that people have always wanted to believe that having intercourse permanently alters the female body.

In the bodies of both Greco-Roman and Arab/Persian medical writing, there are numerous discussions of how the doctors believed intercourse altered the female genitals. There is, in this literature, a really staggering variety of descriptions of what the female genitals were believed to be like: corrugated tubes like the bendy part of a soda straw, canals whose walls were tied together with webs of blood vessels or sealed off by trampoline-like stretched skins, “knots” of ligaments and blood vessels that blocked the entrance to the vagina, and so on. One writer even suggested that there was a little nodule of flesh that looked like a chickpea up in there, and that this getting ruptured was the cause of bleeding at first sexual intercourse.

The drawback, of course, is that none of this is actually found in the body! But doctors wanted there to be, because a) they wanted something that would explain why some women bleed the first time their vaginas are penetrated sexually, and b) they wanted something that would provide some kind of tangible proof of virginity.

So, basically, they kept on inventing things that could—assuming they could be proven to exist at all—provide these answers.

This is where the hymen comes in. The word “hymen” is Greek for “membrane.” It can indicate any old membrane, and indeed in ancient Greek medical writing, that’s exactly what it does mean: the pericardium is the “hymen” of the heart, the amniotic sac is the “hymen” of the fetus in the womb, and so on. It’s unclear exactly how “hymen” became specifically about the female genitals, but my guess is that as it became more and more obvious that all these webs and knots and veils and corrugated tubes did not exist, people defaulted to the assumption that “okay, okay, so there’s nothing up in there that looks like a chickpea and bleeds when you poke it… but there must be a membrane or something in there somewhere that bleeds when you punch a hole through it, right? Sure! Of course, there has to be!” Because again, doctors wanted some way to explain this phenomenon of why (some) women bleed when they are first vaginally penetrated. And membrane, as we’ve seen, equals “hymen.”

The assumption that there was some membrane in the vagina—in short, that a “hymen” existed—predates by several centuries anyone actually systematically looking for or finding such a thing in the bodies of actual women. The hymen wasn’t identified in a dissection until 1544. Even then, and even today, though, we do not really know how much we can and can’t tell from the hymen. The more we learn about hymens, the more we discover that they aren’t very useful for determining whether a woman is a virgin or not, simply because hymens come in so many shapes and sizes, and because they can, in many cases, change shape, size, and configuration over the course of one’s life. A hymen can literally look entirely different at different ages, without anything external happening to it at all.

But this doesn’t change the basic fact that we as patients look to doctors to have more information about the human body than we do. We want and expect doctors to be able to figure out the mysterious things our bodies do… that is how they diagnose and heal us, after all. Nor does it change the basic fact that doctors, since the dawn of medicine, have felt a strong need to be able to say that they, as authority figures, really have that information, and really understand those mysteries.

The short answer is that we often believe that doctors can diagnose virginity from the hymen because we desperately want there to be SOMEONE who can give us a definitive answer. And the reason that we believe that the hymen is a useful basis for making that diagnosis at all is basically the same reason: we desperately want there to be SOME part of the body that can give us a definitive answer about virginity. But really we’re no closer to having a definitive medical means of determining virginity than we were when we were looking for those “chickpeas.”

KG: You are, maybe surprisingly, sympathetic to those who choose to have hymen restoration surgery.

HB: I’m sympathetic to many, but definitely not all, women who choose to have hymen restoration surgery.

I have a great deal of sympathy for women who seek out hymen restoration surgeries because of the threat of violence (whether physical or social or both). The simple fact is that not all women—and not even all economically privileged women—live in societies, communities, or cultures where they are free from the threat of severe repercussions if they are believed to be (let alone “proven”) unchaste. This is true around the world, in first world countries as well as third world countries. If a hymen restoration surgery is what stands between a woman and an acid attack, or beatings, or worse, then by all means she should be able to have that surgery.

These surgeries aren’t a cure-all, though. First of all, they are no guarantee that bad things won’t happen to women anyway. As we should have all figured out by now, what people believe to be true about women’s sexuality often trumps what actually is true. There is also the risk of the surgery being discovered, which can have its own terrible consequences.

But there is the larger problem, too, which is that at their most fundamental level hymen restoration surgeries cater to the myth that there is a particular way that hymens are supposed to be, and a particular way that hymens and women’s genitals are supposed to look and act, and a specific set of things that happen with virginal women’s bodies. None of that is true. So hymen restorations are propping up a fantasy of the virginal female body that I think is both societally poisonous and medically, biologically wrong.

Which brings me to the women who have hymen reconstruction surgeries that I categorically do not support: there are some women, admittedly not very many, who have hymen reconstruction surgery specifically and openly as a means of buying into the fantasy of this inaccurate, imaginary “virginal body.” Sometimes they have them to fulfill a husband or boyfriend’s fantasy of being with a virgin. Surgically “remastered” virginity as sex toy, in other words. I think that’s politically and ethically bankrupt, both from the patient side and the surgeon side. If someone wants to play-act at being a virgin for the sexual thrill of it, why not just take acting lessons? It sure seems a lot more honest, and frankly more fun, than paying someone a lot of money to remodel your genitals with a scalpel.

KG: The inevitability of first-time bleeding is another myth you put to rest. In many parts of the world, women are expected to produce stained linen on their wedding night, and I’ve been amused at the creative solutions they’ve found to this problem. (My favorite is the jaded midwife who waits in the next room with a supply of chicken blood, unbeknownst to the eager groom.) Yet it’s a serious issue – women have been divorced and even killed over this. Did you find, in your research, any open resistance to this practice among women, or was it mostly the clandestine sort?

HB: I think that, like many forms of female resistance against sexual and reproductive oppression, it is mostly clandestine. But I also get the sense that the strategies women have recourse to in this regard are a sort of open secret in many cultures, things that “everyone knows” are being done but that people just turn a blind eye to so that they can continue to tell themselves that “but of course none of the women in my family do things like that.”

KG: I think one of the most important points you make is that, historically, a girl might start menstruating at 13, be married at 14, and have her first child at 15. The transition to adulthood happened very quickly, so expecting her to “wait for marriage” in such a scenario doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice. But today girls might start menstruating at 10 and not get married until 25 or 30. In the urban Middle East, where housing shortages have led to a much higher age of first marriage, this is often discussed as a source of frustration for men, but there’s still this nudge-nudge wink-wink thing going on that allows them to have secret girlfriends, or to pay for sex. But talking about sexual frustration among women during those years remains largely taboo.

HB: I am of two minds about the whole putative problem of sexual frustration. I think there is a level to which sexual interest is just going to be there, sure, particularly for adolescent and young adult people. But I think culture has a lot to do with whether sexual interest that does not have an outlet is going to be perceived as frustrating or not, and how serious an issue such frustration is going to be perceived to be.

In a culture where women are not expected/permitted to experience or at least voice sexual frustration, it is, I think, pretty likely that they actually will experience less of it because they simply aren’t being taught to, or expected to, experience any unrequited sexual desires they may have as “frustrating.” Perhaps they are just mildly annoyed. Perhaps it strikes them as something unruly that the body does, a bit like menstruating, that just has to be coped with. Perhaps they are noticing it and it is teaching them things about what they like and what turns them on. I mean, I personally find that unrequited sexual desire can be quite pleasant sometimes: you can think all you want without the pressure of having to do anything, or taking the risk of doing something about it and having it turn out to be a disappointment. So I think it is important to be clear that just because sexual desire isn’t being acted upon doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a “frustration.”

But of course this is as true for men as it is for women. I have known a number of men who have felt very pressured to express that they were frustrated by a lack of sexual activity in their lives but who did not, by nature, actually find it all that frustrating! What they found frustrating is having to put up a front, and having to posture as if they were suffering from sexual frustrations they didn’t feel, in order to not have their masculinity questioned. This is a double standard that definitely cuts both ways.

If I had my way, I would like a world in which men and women could freely talk about how they actually felt about sex, including unrequited sexual desires. Some of them doubtless would talk about frustration. But I think we would find that a lot of them would be talking about more complicated and varied responses, too.

Part II of this interview continues here.

Welcome! This site serves two main purposes: to entertain and educate the Believing and curious community, and to generate a bit of cash—God willing. But there’s a lot more about HijabMan.

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